NJ News Commons

Hack Jersey

It’s official, folks! Day 1 of Hack Jersey 2.0 is officially underway. We’ve got a great group of coders, developers, techies, writers, journalists, and creative thinkers this year. As you read this, each of our teams is working tirelessly to improve journalism though data, code, and play.

Our resident videographer and producer, TJ Russell, put together the short video above with clips from this morning’s opening ceremonies.

Kathy Kiely, managing editor of the Sunlight Foundation, stepped in front of the room of New Jersey investigative and political reporters and began with the familiar laugh line, “I’m from Washington and I’m here to help you.”

On July 9, 2014, we hosted a training session for news entrepreneurs at Montclair State University. The all-day session included talks from entrepreneurial journalists, marketing strategists, ad sales representatives, and other professionals from throughout the news ecosystem.

Dozens of potential independent news publishers descended upon the Multimedia Newswoom at Montclair State University on March 11, 2014 for a day of training on “How to Start a News Site.” The event was the first of many in the NJ News Commons’ latest round of Grow and Strengthen, a project aimed at seeding and incubating local news sites across New Jersey.

Three videos from the Open Data NJ conference, held at Montclair State University on May 15, 2014, are now up and running for those who were unable to attend the conference in person — or who want to watch it again.

Local news startups need to understand their communities with greater precision if they are to survive today’s difficult journalism economics, Eric Newton said last night in the kick-off of Montclair State University’s national conference on the future of local news.

“Do you know as much about your communities as the commercial data miners or political data miners know?” he asked. “We don’t know the topic love of all of our people.” Newton, senior advisor to the president of the Knight Foundation, is a nationally known writer and scholar of news trends, who has been at Knight since 2001 and was the founding managing editor of the Newseum. Topic love, a term he attributes to Michael Maness of Knight, refers to readers’ topical news obsessions.

Newton gave the keynote speech at the opening reception for Innovating the Local News Ecosystem, a national conference sponsored by the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State. The conference continues today, bringing together upwards of 250 news leaders from around the country to speak about the business of local news. The main sessions of the conference will be livestreamed here starting at 9 a.m. Conversation will be organized around the hashtag #innovatelocal.

Kamila Kolodynska, 22, was born in Szprotawa, Poland. She lives in Leszno Gorne, Poland until she immigrated to the United States with her family when she was 10 years old. Her family immigrated to New Jersey to seek medical help for her older sister who has neurofibromatosis. Kamila lives in Clifton and attends Montclair State. She hopes to continue her studies in political science in the United States and to one day work in the immigration field to help others navigate the system.

This video was produced for The Immigration Project by Justin Guerrier, in association with documentary marker Beth Toni Kruvant, Guerrier graduated from Montclair State in May 2013 with a degree in Filmmaking and currently works for Brookdale Television as a production technician. He also works as a freelance producer, camera operator, sound mixer and editor.

How do we measure how we’re doing as news organizations? In unique visitors, page views — or whether the crooks we write about go to jail?

On January 24, NJ News Commons hosted a session at the Princeton Public Library featuring Dick Tofel, president of ProPublica. Tofel explained to a rapt audience how news organizations can measure the impact of their reporting, using anecdotes from his own experience leading a national investigative news site. Watch the video here:

Holding up a black-and-white election poster of father, since slain, Ibrahim Momin feels the same fate could be in store for him if the U.S. fails to grant him political asylum. Photo: Beverly Peterson. By J.M. RAHMAN, PATERSON TIMES Since 2009, when…

Here’s some great stuff available for news organizations in New Jersey on Election Night. Take advantage of these embeds to keep your readers — and their conversation — on your website throughout election day and night.

— NJTV will provide wall-to-wall election coverage anchored by Mike Schneider Tuesday night from 8 p.m. to 11:30 pm. Schneider, correspondents and guests will provide election results, commentary and live feeds from election headquarters. Pull the embed code straight from the YouTube, and be sure to credit NJTV. NJTV is using the hashtag #NJDecides.